Features » September 28, 2007

Floating Utopias

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Freedom is late.

Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.

A visit to the “news” section of freedomship.com reveals a more sluggish pace. The most recent messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how “scam operations” are slowing things down but that “[t]hings are happening, and they are moving fast.” Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished. Indeed, it is not yet started. Despite this, Freedom Ship International Inc. has been startlingly successful in raising publicity for this “floating city.” Much credulous journalistic cooing over “the biggest vessel in history,” with its “hospitals, banks, sports centres, parks, theaters and nightclubs,” not to mention its airport, has ignored the vessel’s stubborn nonexistence.

Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.

And despite the apparent corrective on the website, the project’s officials have not been shy in purveying that impression. They have pushed promotional literature that, in the words of one journalist, “paints the picture of a luminous tax haven,” and stressed that the ship will levy “[n]o income tax, no real estate tax, no sales tax, no business duties, no import duties.” Of course, as no cruise ship could ever levy income tax, to trumpet that fact is preposterous, except as a propaganda strategy.

Freedom Ship’s board of directors are canny enough to recognize tax hatred as a defining characteristic of the tradition of fantasies in which it sits. It is one of countless recent dreams of a tax-free life on the ocean wave: advocates of “seasteading” are disproportionately adherents of “libertarianism,” that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence.

Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches–minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.–just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.

Above all, they recast their most banal avarice–the disinclination to pay tax–as a principled blow for political freedom. Not content with existing offshore tax shelters, multimillionaires and property developers have aspired to build their own. For each such rare project that sees (usually brief) life, there are many unfettered by actual existence, such as Laissez-Faire City, a proposed offshore tax haven inspired by a particularly crass and gung-ho libertarianism, that generated press interest in the mid-’90s only to collapse in infighting and bad blood; or New Utopia, an intended sea-based libertarian micro-nation in the Caribbean that degenerated with breathtaking predictability into nonexistence and scandal.

However, one senses in even their supporters’ literature a dissatisfaction with these attempts that has nothing to do with their abject failure. It is also psycho-geographical: There is something about the atolls, mounts, reefs and miniature islets on which these pioneers have attempted to perch that insults their dignity.

A parable from seasteading’s past goes some way in explaining. In 1971, millionaire property developer Michael Oliver attempted to establish the Republic of Minerva on a small South Pacific sand atoll. It was soon off-handedly annexed by Tonga, and, in a traumatic actualized metaphor, allowed to dissolve back into the sea. To defeat the predatory outreach of nations and tides, it is clearly not enough to be offshore: True freedom floats.

Utopia degraded

Of course, visions of floating state evasion cannot always be explained by a hankering for tax evasion. There have been other precursors. Ships have allowed groups ranging from cheerfully illicit pirate radio stations to socially committed abortion providers, like Women On Waves, to avoid local laws. Not surprisingly, this use for ships has been enthusiastically adopted by businesses, such as SeaCode, which promotes locating outsourced foreign software engineers three miles off the coast of Los Angeles to avoid pesky immigration and labor laws.

It is the less instrumentalist iterations that inspire the imagination. Occasionally, in a spirit of can-do contrarianism, some offshore spit or rig has been designated an independent country, such as Sealand, a sea-tower-based nation with no permanent inhabitants on Britain’s Suffolk coast. The startling notion of coagulated ship-city has unsurprisingly been featured in fiction, as in Lloyd Kropp’s Sargasso-based The Drift and Neal Stephenson’s “The Raft,” in Snow Crash. It is a measure of how disastrous a film Waterworld was that its floating homesteads failed to hold the attention. The cultural fascination, however, remains.

Many of the projects currently under discussion cite ecological concerns as their rationale. However, the more ambitious these projects are, the more vague their details and mechanics. The unbearably New-Age habitat of Celestopea is to be built of the wincingly punning and hypothetically enviro-friendly Seament. Clearly, the original rationale of seasteading is sheer utopian exuberance.

Floating cities are dreamed of because how cool is that?–an entirely legitimate, admirable reason. The archives of seasteading are irresistible reading, the best of the utopias are awesome, and floating-city imaginings are in themselves a delightful mental game. The problem is the crippling of this tradition by free-market vulgarians.

In these times, utopian imagination for its own sake has a bad rap, so some unconvincing instrumental rationale must be tacked on–yeah, save the planet, whatever. Among the rather cautious purposes architect Eugene Tsui lists for his proposed floating city of Nexus are the development of mariculture, clean energy and “experimental education programs”: Reading these bullet points, one might almost forget that Nexus is a five-mile-long, self-propelling mountainous island shaped like a horseshoe crab. Its sheer beautiful preposterousness shouldn’t be an embarrassment: It is the point of the dream, whatever the design specs say.

Utopianism has always had two, usually though not always contradictory, aesthetic and avant-gardist gravitational pulls: toward a hallucinatory baroque or, alternately, a post-Corbusier functionalism. In seasteading, these iterations are represented by Tsui’s hallucinatory organicism on one hand and Buckminster Fuller’s extraordinary, floating, ziggurat-like Triton City on the other.

The libertarian seasteaders are heirs to this visionary tradition but degrade it with their class politics. They almost make one nostalgic for more grandiose enemy dreams. The uncompromising monoliths of fascist and Stalinist architecture expressed their paymasters’ monstrous ambitions. The wildest of the libertarian seasteaders, New Utopia, manages to crossfertilize its drab Miami-ism with enough candy floss Las Vegaries to keep a crippled baroque distantly in sight. Freedom Ship, however, is a floating shopping mall, a buoyant block of midrange Mediterranean hotels. This failure of utopian imagination is nowhere clearer than in the floating city of the long defunct but still influential Atlantis Project.

It is a libertarian dream. Hexagonal neighborhoods of square apartments bob sedately by tiny coiffed parks and tastefully featureless marinas, an Orange County of the soul. It is the ultimate gated community, designed not by the very rich and certainly not by the very powerful, but by the middlingly so. As a utopia, the Atlantis Project is pitiful. Beyond the single one-trick fact of its watery location, it is tragically non-ambitious, crippled with class anxiety, nostalgic not for mythic glory but for the anonymous sanctimony of an invented 1950s. This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away–set sail into a tax-free sunset.

None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory. It may be indulged, certainly, for the useful ideas it can throw up, and its prophets have at times influenced dominant ideologies–witness the cack-handed depredations of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile after Allende’s bloody overthrow. But untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of “pure” libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class.

Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.

See why we’re re-inventing the In These Times magazine, and how you can be part of it.

I look forward to establishing "Open Seas Wealth Acquisition Inc" dedicated to the free market of raiding these seasteads for their property.

Posted by ColBatGuano on 2016-09-14 14:17:08

They always seem to overlook the fact that they'll still need a few thousand of us "parasites" to cook, clean, and operate their little floating paradise.

Posted by Phil B. on 2016-08-17 12:58:15

Hi China, good to see that you are as spirited and committed to radical political discourse as in the old days ... btw I never had the chance to congratulate on your impressive piece of scholarly agitation 'Between Equal Rights' ... however, let me tell you that I have gradually but surely turned libertarian since 2008 in my effort to understand how this crash happened, its consequences and how society might progress today ... I discovered a compelling social science research programme and political project in the ambit of Austrian Economics, New Institutional Economics, and Libertarian political theory ... why not join the debate at the 'battle of ideas' ... my session is 'Libertarians of the world unite?' http://www.battleofideas.org.u...

Posted by Patrik Schumacher on 2015-10-11 11:12:43

Used to be called pirates and slavers.

Posted by Baaly Hadad on 2015-07-08 12:24:03

It's a shame Mr Mieville is a socialist. I just discovered his works of fiction and then was curious to see what kind of message his rather political books are likely to communicate.

Some of this article indulges petulent guilt-by-association argument, but other parts are certainly true. Anarchists are ignorant of the plain reality that a power vacuum never exists for long. As a classical liberal the purity tests libertarians deliver to one another certainly irk me in very ironic ways.

And yet this rag of a zine promotes an ideology with similarly pathetic levels of self-awareness. Even an angry proletarian mob will have it's ruler, though it be a different one than that which they overthrow, and though it will have a different group of satellite bourgeois. He who sets the prices and quotas becomes de facto master and wields the army to effect his whims. In that way, class equality is always and necessarily the same as extreme, extreme, extreme inequality.

Furthermore, the problems socialists associate with the market are not the products thereof but rather of the political system which an un-vigilant constituency allows to erect itself around that market system. By which I mean, monopolies are unnatural phenomena arising particularly from the monied interests capturing the legislative body. Regulations, so often hailed by progressives and socialists, are in reality tools written and crafted by these monied interests specifically to protect themselves from free market competition, which let free would subject them to the whims of their free countrymen.

Witness the decreasing numbers of banks which emerge from each depression after the government has enacted more regulations in each case. Witness corporate subsidies. Or mandates to buy private insurance products. Or, most egregiously, the accredited investor rule which monopolized private equity markets, and the FHA which nationalized the mortgage industry and has resulted in cities which are ALL built by the same national entities controlled by monied trusts and funds with no connection to the cities they are building.

The fascinating thing is that everybody knows about the armies of corporate lobbyists in DC. But somehow progressives and socialists are blind to the fact that they are clamoring for an expansion of the apparatus which the monied interests design and control.

Contrary to libertarian orthodoxy, however, I don't advocate the dissolution of government, but rather I try to advance true constitutional republic, which means representatives at the community level. This would mean districts of 5 to 10 thousand citizens. Currently the house of representatives has districts of 715,000 people. The originally proposed first amendment would have limited them to 50,000 people, which would mean a house of representatives of over 6,000 members. It would be a house of the people -- as designed.

Posted by Cody on 2015-01-24 21:41:11

What a perfect demonstration of the hatred fueled by envy that underlies most leftists' thinking.

Posted by Berisha's Ghost on 2014-09-23 08:23:45

Being "saloon" libertarian I have to admit that this is the best eye-opening article I've ever read about the subject. I now feel embarrassed and naive how many things i didn't take into the consideration. It also showed me painfully that my motivations on subconscious level are not as pure as i believed they were. Thank you very much for it.

Posted by Nezmar on 2014-08-31 12:40:24

Well written, great stuff!

Posted by alex on 2013-09-29 17:24:57

Excellent read. Thank you.

Posted by Daniel Wright on 2013-06-13 15:01:32

Your point might be more interesting if your example wasn't literally more than a century ago.

Posted by gwern0 on 2012-12-07 17:31:28

“...the biggest vessel in history,” What was the last "biggest" ship built? Oh yeah, Titanic. I look forward to 40,000 John Galts meeting the same fate. Can you imagine the fight for lifeboats among that privileged crowd?

Posted by Felonious Monk on 2012-11-02 10:40:50

true dat

Posted by Raggedyman on 2012-10-05 06:01:28

Mieville incorrectly brands the Freedom Ship a libertarian phenomenon by conflating the Freedom Ship's advertising talking points with the tenets of libertarianism. No libertarian would give up privacy and personal mobility to join a floating coop with questionable legal status and an authoritarian social structure. In his argument against libertarianism Mieville has replaced the straw man with the straw boat.
There is a nonzero percentage of corruption and error-making in every human organization. At its core, libertarian thinking in the United States recognizes that concentration of power at the federal level empowers and projects that percentage of damaging corruption exponentially. In free societies, the power of corruption must be limited, not concentrated. Since corruption/error is the constant, power itself must be limited and carefully distributed to reduce risk. The nation model of states with a limited federal government preserves power at local levels where true accountability is possible, and this limits the risk effectively.
Per his Wiki entry, Mr. Mieville associates himself with a socialist platform. Socialism takes the optimistic view of concentrated state power: that representatives honor the will of the populace; that elections are a self-healing process to remove corruption; that taxes will maintain public infrastructure and not be wasted or funnelled into private hands. Sometimes it can. But what does human history say about how long benevolent concentrated state power remains benevolent?
When concentrated state power becomes corrupt and self-serving, the general population is shut out of the process of making laws and bears their imposition as subjects. The real progressive thinking in the US today acknowledges that the federal government has exceeded the limits on power that the founders created for the purpose of controlling risk. This view is most often associated with libertarians because they have consistently stood for restoring strict limits to federal power. Right now one presidential candidate advocates restoring limits to federal power and he ran once as a libertarian: Ron Paul.Posted by tree.path on 2007-11-14 07:21:41

My guess is that it would free one from supporting the Iraq war and the war on drugs, as well as any bridges to nowhere. If you look at the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom, taxes form only part of it, things like regulation and corruption make up the rest. I don't think the ship is ever going to leave port, but in the hypothetical of it doing so one might assume it wouldn't attempt to meddle in the lives of its customers. Peter Leeson has a paper critiquing such "vertically-integrated proprietary communities" from an anarcho-capitalist perspective saying that if they have such power over their citizens they will be prone to abuse it. http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/new_paper_on_an.htmlPosted by TGGP on 2007-10-30 09:00:51

just what exactly is the freedom ship supposed to be freeing anyone from? stuff still costs money... you still pay income tax.. sure they say they won't charge taxes, but that will be quickly offset by the higher cost of goods onboard... i think a better term than freedom ship would be rich-folk-sick-of-flying-to-a-different-country-each-week shipPosted by norrab on 2007-10-30 08:44:28

A good blog response is here: http://positiveliberty.com/2007/10/captains-and-the-kings-a-reply-to-mieville-on-libertarian-escapism.html#more-2764Posted by TGGP on 2007-10-11 00:26:09

China is wrong to state that libertarians are averse to recognizing pirates. Peter Leeson, an anarcho-capitalist professor, has done a great deal of research on functional pirate "anarchy" (Hakim Bey referred to them as Temporary Autonomous Zones) which has been written about in publications like the New Yorker. See here:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/07/peter-leeson-in.htmlPosted by TGGP on 2007-10-06 13:41:44

As one of the editors who adapted this piece, the lack of references to Patri Friedman's book was my fault, not China's. In the essay that appears in the collection Evil Paradises, China includes a footnote that cites (and lauds) Mr. Friedman's book. Since magazines like In These Times never use footnotes, I overlooked that citation, but that, obviously, was a mistake. I certainly should have incorporated it into the text, and I apologize to Mr. Friedman for not doing so.Posted by Brian Cook on 2007-10-03 10:17:22

You seem to have two points:
1) Libertarianism sucks. Or at least anti-tax libertarianism sucks.
2) Seasteading doesn't/won't work.
On the first point, I disagree, but there's not much to talk about. I'll only say that while you might not like the libertarianism you criticize in this article, in the polycentric world we would like to move closer to, libertarians would be free to live under libertarian laws (so much the worse for us, right?) and socialists would be free to live under socialist laws (so much the better for you, right?).
On the second point, I assume that since you have a PhD, you are at least somewhat interested in truth, rather than merely pushing your ideology. As such, I think you should have linked to, or at least referenced, Patri Friedman's book. The readers of your article know your views. Let them at least, if they wish, read the other side. Maybe seasteading won't work; let your readers see the other side of the argument.Posted by Jonathan Wilde on 2007-10-02 10:24:02

I'm a bit sad to see so much material apparently drawn from the book I wrote (Seasteading: A Practical Guide To Homesteading The High Seas [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/index.html ]), and not see it even mentioned. At least, the set of projects listed in the article reads like a walk through the Review section of my book [ http://seastead.org/commented/paper/review.html ], which seems unlikely to happen by chance. So it seems like my book was used heavily as a source. I'm not familiar with the standards for non-academic writing, but in the world I come from, it's considered dishonest not to state your sources.
As to the content of the article: yes, the history of floating utopias has, to date, consisted of scammers and dreamers. That's why people like me, with a more serious interest in the subject, write web pages about how the Freedom Ship is bullshit (http://patrifriedman.com/projects/independence/freedomship.html), and spend lots of words in our books describing how wackos like New Utopia are...well...wackos. Floating cities are an idea that appeals to dreamers (which again is why it's a bummer that Mievelle left my contributions out, since the whole point of my book was to take a more realistic approach.)
But just because the idea appeals to dreamers doesn't mean it's absurd, and that it can't be approached realistically. For an SF author, I must say that Mieville has a rather sad lack of vision. He almost seems to delight in this piece at sneering at and belittling people for dreaming about better worlds. Without such dreams, we would have less crackpots for sure, but also less visionaries. Maybe seasteading is a hopeless dream, but I think there is at least a small chance that it can revolutionize the world by transforming government into a dynamic, competitive industry, which will benefit everyone, not just libertarians. Here's my article arguing why: http://patrifriedman.com/projects/socs/commented/drawer/dynamic_geography.html
The bottom line to me is that it feels like the piece, while prettily written, is in essence a hatchet job by someone who demonizes libertarians. And demonization is antithetical to understanding. Yeah, it makes for nicely flowing vituperative prose, but not a very accurate picture of libertarianism's flaws, let alone a balanced viewpoint. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms to be made about libertarianism and seasteading. I've made lots myself, and heard plenty more from smart people who knew enough about the subject to argue about the actual movements, rather than the caricatures which Mieville paints here.
Anyway, if any readers are interested in seeing what the more realistic side of the movement actually believes/expects/claims, instead of just this caricature, please check out my book at seastead.org. The most recent draft is all available online.Posted by patrissimo on 2007-10-01 23:24:14

What I find disheartening is not the concept of this Utopian or Segretopian projects, but that when cast off their marketing sheen, there's still a number of people who would support them, namely here the people of Trujillo. Why it is so? Because a closer look would reveal that they would accept a simultaneous appropiation of land and being the subject of a pyramid (pun) scam while aspiring for a better life beside the crazy rich.
Yes, probably no freedom ship will sail off Trujillo, but surely walled communities and their ill cascading effects (broken society, increased costs and appropiation of the public space) will take root there as they have been doing elsewhere in Latin America. And that's a fairly utopian enough for the investors.Posted by MarlboroTestMonkey7 on 2007-10-01 14:08:55

I looked through the freedom ship site. It seems like a pretty obvious scam site to me. I am amazed they've been there as long as the dates indicate. You should probably visit their addresses to see what is there, if anything.
Still, it would seem fitting to con the rich with a utopian vision of Richistan on the high seas. Were it ever realized (but not by these con artists) it would surely turn into a dystopian world. Maybe they can hire Dennis Hopper as the captain (reprising his role in "Waterworld").Posted by kcdancer on 2007-10-01 07:59:11

I recall the pseudonymous anarchist Rayo mocking the idea of floating cities is his pamplet "Vonu." (Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he was in favor of it, and I mocked the idea as I read it. It's been a while.)
The idea back then (1960's ... when he wrote it, not when I read it) was that families would sail in yacht flotillas, farming the sea (actual farming! with crops growing from dirt on deck!), trading for necessities (vitamin C, manufactured goods, etc.) in port, and generally enjoying the benefits of free, non-coercive association. If anyone didn't like the mayor of the flotilla, then they could sail away and form a new flotilla.
If course, if it were that simple, if you could grow enough crops on deck and catch enough fish to eat, with enough left over to trade for other goods in port, I think we humans would have developed these floating cities centuries ago. I mean, we've been farming for what, 10,000 years? And probably fishing for longer. And there's been no shortage of despotic, oppressive, and violently coercive regimes from which to flee.
Hell, just ask the fishermen of New England or the watermen of Maryland how well they're doing these days - what with the fishing stocks depleted due to over-fishing, which is turn was due the fact that you have to catch and sell a lot of fish just to stay afloat - literally and figuratively.
But, as China Mieville points out, the visions are utopian (true, sometimes they're bland, banal utopias), and as is often the case with libertarian utopians, reality and practicality have little-to-no space in their proprosals.
As for the Freedom Ship: Why is it that people who defend the free market to the last breath have the weakest grasp of basic economics? Supply and demand, people! Supply and demand! On a floating city, physical space is gong to have the highest demand because there's a definite physical limit to its supply. Think of the real estate prices! And where the hell are you gonna go when you're priced out of the market? Overboard? Or will they be kind enough to drop you off at the nearest port ... for a fee, of course.Posted by djmagaro on 2007-09-28 11:16:46